


A Dance with Death

by Moosepelheim



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fix-It, Like fuck Sherlock forgot a sister, M/M, Post Season 4, So Little Time, So many loose threads to tie up, Spoilers, The more I think about it the more frustrated I get, are you shitting me, driving me fucking mad with this shit, god damn it, sherlock POV, spoilers as far as the eye can see
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 05:33:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9420818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moosepelheim/pseuds/Moosepelheim
Summary: I have always maintained that my body, and its constituent parts, is merely transport for the seat of my intellect. Growing and fine-tuning the great, glittering web of neurons and chemicals that comprise my brain was my priority for much of my life. Aside from my brain I valued my eyes, ears, and nose for their necessary intermediary roles. Everything else was acknowledged, but hardly important. If I could have been a brain in a jar, and still managed the business of solving puzzles from my watery cell, I would have been pleased.I valued my heart only marginally more than I valued my spleen, which is to say not much at all.Of course I’m using “heart” colloquially. I am well aware that emotions are products of the mind.This document is to be published after both John Watson and myself are dead, because John Watson is a spoil sport of the highest calibre, and does not want me to discuss what I deem to be one of my most important and compelling cases of my career.





	

**Author's Note:**

> tw: flippant attitude towards suicide, death in general.

To whom it may concern,

I have always maintained that my body, and its constituent parts, is merely transport for the seat of my intellect. Growing and fine-tuning the great, glittering web of neurons and chemicals that comprise my brain was my priority for much of my life. Aside from my brain I valued my eyes, ears, and nose for their necessary intermediary roles. Everything else was acknowledged, but hardly important. If I could have been a brain in a jar and still managed the business of solving puzzles from my watery cell, I would have been pleased.

I valued my heart only marginally more than I valued my spleen, which is to say not much at all.

Of course I’m using “heart” colloquially. I am well aware that emotions are felt and contained within the mind.

This document is to be published after both John Watson and myself are dead, because John Watson is a spoil sport of the highest calibre, and does not want me to discuss what I deem to be one of my most important and compelling cases of my career. This is possibly because the case involved rather a lot of horrible, painfully personal matters for him. For both of us. I am better at understanding sentiment, these days. I… feel sentiment. But in some areas I suppose I remain rather willfully obtuse, especially if it serves my purposes.

It’s part of my charm, I think. John Watson would hardly regard me so well if I were anything other than what I am, so I try to be myself as loudly and frequently as possible.

So I do not understand why sentiment should prevent me from discussing something that happened in my life, that was important to me, and that I find interesting. Out of respect for John I will, as I stated above, wait until we are both dead before I publish the following case notes. I may die first, in which case this may be published many years after my actual death, depending on how long John lives. If John dies first I shall, of course, follow immediately after, and this will be published much sooner.

I express the purest, basest, most repellent sentiment I am capable of when I say that I will be truly lost without my blogger. It’s unlikely I’ll even need to “off” myself. When John passes, so too will my heart. The parallel has been drawn before.

My heart.

My John Watson.

Someone once threatened to burn it out of me. They almost succeeded.

I will attempt to prevent the following narrative from becoming bogged down with such soppiness as I have displayed above, although I may fail. Partially this is because as I age the quality of my mind, and therefore my writing, declines. Mostly it is because my hard drive is slowly being corrupted by an ugly sweater wearing, profanity spewing, violently affectionate little virus whose name I’m sure I don’t need to repeat.

I hope my brother is alive to read this. I imagine he will terrorize all his hideous little secret science minions into making him immortal so he can go on controlling Britain forever. Stranger things have happened. If a glowing blue rabbit, why not an immortal Mycroft? If so, the following is addressed directly to him:

-Your office desk.

-The back of your car.

-Your favorite booth at that little French restaurant you tried to keep me away from with your frequent, odious presence.

I hope I have spoiled the rest of your eternity.

With that out of the way, I shall proceed with relating my case notes.

…

I have sat here in front of the computer for an hour, trying to decide the best approach to this. John has walked behind me no less than three times, no doubt trying to decipher what I am writing. Currently everything is in a code of my own devising, which he is too slow witted to decipher.

Meaning I merely changed the font to wingdings. He is literally that incompetent. It’s like loving a golden retriever that has somehow managed to find its way into the body of a short, rather adorable man—a perpetual state of slightly cheerful confusion, a worrying habit of trying to hump anything that moves (to be fair he has grown out of this), a bewildering desire to always ‘go outside for walks’, an obsession with food, a tendency to mark and aggressively protect things that he considers his (laptop, phone, gun, and myself for examples), the ability to sleep anywhere and at any time. Loyalty. Also his leg does the funniest thing if you scratch him behind the ear just right. Oh, I’m having a lot of fun drawing these parallels, I must share my discovery with John.

…

I have shared with John and he does not appreciate my wit. I responded by pretending to throw something across the room while palming it, and he actually turned his head to try to find what I had thrown. He punched me rather hard in the thigh when he realized what I’d done, and now I’m giving him the silent treatment.

I must never tell him that I’ve classically conditioned him into fetching me my slippers and the newspaper when I’m in a foul mood, or he may actually leave me.

Perhaps the difficulty I am experiencing with writing this case is because I have grown so used to John always writing everything up for me. I have grown too dependent on him. An understatement.

I shall have to be my own blogger again, just this once. It might be helpful to “think” like John Watson for the duration of this. An experiment. I must get into the mindset. I wonder if I can fit into one of his jumpers. I’m not willing to get up and try, so I’ll just have to pretend I’m 10% dumpier looking.

Second, I need a suitably awful title.

~~The East Wind~~

~~The Hidden Assassin~~

~~The case of John Watson and yet another disastrous relationship, although rather more disastrous than usual~~

A Dance with Death

Yes. That one.

A Dance with Death.

The case began when I attracted the attention of a rather odious little man named James Moriarty. I had stumbled on the fringes of his vast web of criminal activity, and he had decided to come out and see if I was a spider or a fly. I was determined to be neither—I was determined to be the rolled up newspaper that slapped Moriarty out of this world. I did succeed at that, but at a high cost.

Sentiment was my downfall in the end, literally, and Moriarty forced me to fake my own death to protect John, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson, all of whom I would have been devastated to lose. My brother did lend invaluable assistance in making sure that I merely had to fake my death. Still, I lost two years of my life trying to track down the remainder of Moriarty’s web, to make sure it was safe to return to my life. To return to John.

My first mistake was in assuming that it was Moriarty’s web to begin with. Spiders aren’t the only things that dance on the end of strings, after all.

When I returned to London it was to discover that John had moved on and was on the precipice of becoming engaged to a woman named Mary Morstan.

On the surface Mary was… acceptable. She didn’t try to prevent John from accompanying me on cases. In fact, she rather encouraged and supported the renewal of our friendship. I appreciated this. When John was kidnapped she came to me directly, and with her “assistance” I was able to retrieve John from the bonfire before lasting damage was done, which cemented my goodwill towards her.

She was intelligent, shared interests with both John and I, showed a tolerance for violence and a wide range of useful skill sets that indicated she would be helpful on cases. I was prepared to become friends with her, despite lingering feelings of jealousy.

I ignored my intuition in the interest of remaining in John’s life. I did not want to run off another of his suitors, because I knew it would truly be the end of our friendship. If only I had been as persistent in assessing Mary as I had done his other girlfriends. Still, to be fair to myself, the worst qualities in John’s girlfriends to date have included: chronic infidelities, deficient intelligence, STDs, and repressed homosexuality, all of which would have resulted in an eventual breakup anyway.

If I looked at Mary I merely looked to check those possibilities off the list. I wasn’t looking for the signs of her being a ‘deadly assassin’. I think anyone would have missed the signs. Even Mycroft.

It wasn’t until she shot me in the chest that I began to suspect Mary wasn’t entirely on the level.

She visited me in the hospital, snuck into my room, told me not to tell John. Threatened me. I thought it was a dream, which was my second mistake.

I did not tell John about his wife, because I decided I would rather show John. I am forever grateful that I did not fully comprehend the danger which Mary posed, because in the end this decision probably saved John’s life.

John stayed with me during the duration of Mary’s pregnancy. He was shaken, although he confessed it was not as painful a betrayal as my faked suicide, which I found strangely gratifying. And shameful, I must confess. I was pleased that I was capable of hurting John more than Mary could, and I think he sensed that. He was not, as far as I know, offended. I think he was slightly gratified at my gratification, which tells you just how twisted John really is. We are both very odd ducks.

He made me swear to him that I would never withhold information from him again, and that I would never knowingly go into danger without him. I swore it to him. I swore it to him many times, any time he would wake up from a nightmare, any time he ended up sleeping in my bed because he needed to know that I was still alive. I wondered how frequently he’d been having these nightmares, if they had been going on for two entire years. I felt the years grow on me then, a tiredness in my heart at the thought of John lying awake in bed, seeing me dead behind his eyelids. I tried, once, to imagine our roles reversed, and I had to evacuate the contents of my stomach.

Nothing indelicate happened when he stayed in my bed, though maybe that would have been helpful. Maybe John might have been convinced to leave Mary after all. Although I suspect that is wishful thinking on my part. She was pregnant, after all, and John is eminently responsible. The clever bitch, with her uterus and ability to give birth.

In the end he was convinced to return to her and in the process of demonstrating his devotion he destroyed the memory stick with her background on it.

Luckily John and I both ignored the stick the entire duration it was in our possession. John felt that anything he needed to know should come directly from Mary, and I was certain I had deduced all I needed to know anyway. John’s loyalty and my hubris helped us dodge yet another literal bullet.

In an effort to protect John and Mary from future harm I decided to take care of Charles Augustus Magnussen and his hold over them. It ended up going rather poorly when I failed to take into account the possibility that he simply had a very good memory. I shot him in the head, in the interest of parsimony.

Instead of jail time I was sent on an undercover assignment that would terminate in my, well, termination. I broke my oath to John by not telling him this. I did not tell him I loved him, either. I used my remaining time with him to make him laugh, and then I boarded the plane and proceeded to shoot up with the rather outrageous amount of heroine I had secreted upon my person, after ducking into the little toilet at the back of the plane for a “quick wee”.

I intended to die before I reached my destination, as a final “fuck you” to Mycroft, but fucking Billy cheated me and gave me a less concentrated dose than what I had paid for. I suppose he suspected my intentions and couldn’t bear to assist me.

In the span of ten minutes I re-read John’s blog post about how we met, was pardoned from my death sentence, proceeded to have one of the finest highs I’ve ever experienced, died for five seconds, and woke up in time to be sassy to Mycroft.

Moriarty had “returned” and I knew exactly what that meant.

That meant that John was in danger. Although I insisted that I was the target, I knew they would come for John. I realized that Moriarty’s web must have been responsible for the bonfire incident. Burning the heart out of me, indeed. I was an idiot not to suspect it sooner.

I distanced myself from John. I couldn’t cut him off completely otherwise it would arouse suspicion, but I took him on less cases, showed less interest in him. I hoped that maybe whoever was coming would see that John was no longer my heart. Maybe they would think it wasn’t necessary to burn him, after all.

Oddly enough, Mary seemed to be entirely okay with leaving John behind to join me on cases, where once she would insist upon setting the two of us up instead. All part of the plan to destroy John Watson, and I was none the wiser until it was almost too late.

And then AGRA.

And then Norbury.

We both thought Mary was dead. I believed her posthumous DVD was really posthumous, and I took her advice as she knew I would. I threw myself into drugs in an attempt to save John Watson, when really all I needed to do was break into his house and yell at him. I proved definitively that John Watson was my heart, I lost sight of the threat of Moriarty, I incapacitated myself, and as a result I nearly lost him

Eurus, the East Wind. A laughable invention, but one designed to land a final blow against John Watson’s heart (against my heart). After all, I had sworn that I wouldn’t keep important secrets from him. How could I have not told him about a secret, psychotic sibling?

When I arrived at the scene I thought I was too late. She had shot him in the chest, nearly exactly where Mary had shot me, and fled. John was delirious, frightened, and I thought that

I thought

I remembered what he had said, about chances, and so I told him.

I thought he was dead, you see.

More importantly, so did Moriarty’s web of assassins.

They had succeeded in burning the heart out of me.

I knew, then, where I needed to go. Where I was expected to go to finish it all.

Bart’s. The 29th. The roof.

And there she was.

“Eurus Holmes” aka Jamie Moriarty. James Moriarty’s twin, and the real mastermind behind the criminal empire.

John was right for once, in a strange twist of fate. It _was_ twins.

She expected that I would throw myself off the roof for her, since my heart was gone, but explained that if I didn’t go willingly she would have her assistant show me the way.

Ro(se)mond Eliz(ab)eth Mary Mor(st)an

 (Sebast) Ro_mo(n)d El(i)z_eth M(a)ry Moran

(Sebastina) Ro_mo_d El_th M_ry (Moran)

I wanted the leftover letters to be a clever anagram. All I could come up with that fit was “Zero them, my lord”, which sounds like what a futuristic robot assassin might say to acknowledge her orders to kill.

This is all in retrospect. At the time I was confused and infuriated.

Mary, aka Sebastina, let me know that she had been the assassin assigned to John from the very beginning. They knew that I wasn't truly dead, once their web began to unravel, and so the original plan was put back into place, with a little twist. Burn the heart out of John first, then burn the heart out of me. Their revenge was truly the most callous, malignant thing that could have been conceived. 

Victory assured, they left me up on the roof to make their little story complete.

Luckily this time I had made sure all my loved ones were protected. My brother “assisted” Sebastina and Jamie off the roof of Bart’s, and in short order we wrapped up the last of that bullshit.

It was all very clever, certainly, but it was mostly awful and I didn’t enjoy “solving” that puzzle. I’d rather never solve a puzzle again that have had any of that happen to John and me.

It was not very satisfying, in the end. John was very quiet when I relayed all the information to him. He had been in a coma at the time, which was my excuse for breaking my vow and going into certain danger on my own, without him.

“I was doing it to protect Rosie too,” I explained to him, hoping to play upon his paternal instincts.

He smiled bitterly. “Do you think Rosie is my daughter?”

I thought about it.

“Yes, regardless of whether she’s got your DNA or not. Don’t be shallow, John.”

I wasn’t about to let him go down that path. He looked ashamed of himself, which meant that would be the end of that.

John looked up at me with a strange expression on his face. “She met me, flirted with me, went on dates with me, made me fall in love with her, got married to me, danced with me, had a child with me… all to fuck _you_ over, just in case you happened to still be alive. I mean… that’s fucking dedication, I guess…”

I smiled ruefully, and like always we began to laugh because it was the exact wrong thing to do. We’re just like that, him and me. It’s an excess of nerves, a reaction to extreme anxiety, but people think it’s because we think death and pain is funny. We don’t think it’s funny. We feel it too deeply, and so we laugh because otherwise we would weep.

“It certainly beat the time one of your girlfriends replaced my shampoo with Nair, as though I wouldn’t notice,” I said.

We both started laughing again.

“Thank god you noticed. I don’t think I’d like you as much without the hair,” John said, teasing me.

“I love you,” I said, because it was the exact wrong thing to say. “I know you’re not gay, but I am, and I love you.”

John sighed and closed his eyes, but he reached out for my hand and held it.

“I love you too,” he said finally. “Maybe not exactly the same way, but just as much, if not more.”

“You’re not…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I meant to say _you aren’t repulsed or offended?_

“No,” he said, as though I’d had the courage to speak out loud. Then he said “I want to move back in with you. Raise Rosie with me, please. I need… I need you.”

“Anything you want,” I said to him. “You and Rosie are my world.”

He kissed the back of my hand, and then let the morphine drip carry him back into sleep. I stayed there until he woke up again and sent me to Mycroft’s to check on Rosie.

He and Rosie moved in, Rosie into a nursery upstairs, and John into my room with me. It was not as awkward as I had expected it to be, and he seemed to agree with me.

I… really don’t know how things progressed to the point of… to the point. And yet they did. If you know what I mean. John seems just as bewildered as I am, though both of us are bewildered in a pleasant way, but Mycroft is horrified by the entire thing and refuses to come to the flat, so I think we keep it up mainly just for that. I think he’s even removed his surveillance from our apartment.

Shortly after John moved in, but well before things between us became _things_ , he slammed down the paper and stared at me with determination. “You do have a secret sibling though, don’t you? And who the hell is Redbeard?”

I sighed deeply.

“Redbeard was my dog. When I was six years old he was put to sleep. At the time I didn’t know what that meant. Mycroft told me it meant that Redbeard had gone somewhere else, to help another little boy who needed him more than I did. I accepted the explanation, but it broke my heart.”

I thought about how Mycroft had the nerve to bring up Redbeard at John’s wedding, as though he really thought Mary needed John more than I did. The absolute bastard.

“And your secret sibling?”

I sighed again.

“Sherringford, our elder brother, was sent to a mental institution on Mycroft’s orders after an assignment went wrong. Sherringford… misinterpreted data and panicked, killing three of his own men. They used to work together, you see. Mycroft worked behind the scenes, and Sherringford did all the legwork. When Sherringford was no longer useful, Mycroft had him sent away. ‘For his own good’. Send him to the ‘East Winds Hospital’ out in the country somewhere. Used to threaten me that the East Wind would claim us all one day. I was young enough at the time that… it made impressions on me. “

“Fucking bastad,” growled John.

“That’s why I don’t speak about Sherringford. It’s… it’s why Mycroft and I will never be… I can never…”

John shook his head and patted my hand “I understand. I’m sorry I brought it up, but it’s been driving me crazy!”

At that moment Rosie decided she’d had enough with being ignored, and demanded my immediate attention by emitting a piercing wail. The child manages to hit the most amazing notes when she decides she wants something. I like to think it’s my influence.

She’s my daughter, you see.

Rosie, I imagine you are reading this, somewhere in the future. I hope none of this hurt you unduly. Part of the reason John never wanted this published was because he thought the truth about your mother would hurt you. I disagreed, but your father’s happiness is the only thing that has ever superseded my own, apart from your happiness.

I wanted you to know because you are my daughter, which means you will _always_ be stronger for knowing the truth.

 

These are the truths I hope you take away from all of this:

-Your father is a good, kind, strong, dangerous man.

-Your mother was a brilliant, strong, dangerous woman.

-John and I are no longer around to protect you, but that doesn’t matter because you hold within your very DNA the best of your mother and father. There is nothing in the world that can master you.

-You are also _my_ daughter, which means there is nothing in the world you cannot master.

 

I am dead now and so is your father, but we are also alive in you.

Dance, Rosie. Keep dancing. Fuck fear, and fuck death.

Keep dancing, because it’s always a game.


End file.
